Nino Avanti, Agent of Change

I am not the kind of futurist who tells you that one day we’re all going to live in geodesic condos, where we’ll drink hormone shakes for Sunday dinner. If that’s what you’re looking for, just go ahead and enter these two words in your Google search-box: Criswell Predicts.

No, my friends, Nino is no tall-hatted soothsayer, no spoon-bending mentalist performing stunts for the amazement of your Kiwanis gathering. Quite the opposite. I’m about demystifying what’s next — about creating a seamless transition from Now to Then.

My clients, who are largely Fortune 500 companies and leading educational institutions, properly regard me as an Agent of Change. In that role, you might say I’m one part yellow-jacketed realtor, and one part shifty-eyed travel agency owner, and my job is to ease your relocation between two distant psychological locales, into an entirely new paradigm. To complete this metaphor, let’s call your destination “Paradigm Estates” or, even better, “Paradigm Meadows,” and think of it as a desirable gated community, with shopping, and parkland, and a nearby cineplex with an adjacent TGI Friday’s, and, most importantly, room for you to grow.

Be very glad your head doesn't weigh as much as this famous author's, and therefore doesn't require constant propping-up

As such, I decry the lack of professionalism displayed by several of my so-called peers in the change-consulting business. It is not merely that their methods are often unsound and their deportment unseemly. I can live with the egg-yoke stains on their black turtlenecks, but I object to their insultingly bad PowerPoint presentations. You’re charging important clients perfectly good money, and the best you can do is fill the screen with dollar-store clip art that would have wowed your kid’s fifth-grade class, back in 2003. It’s jolly jokers like that — yes, I’m talking about you, Malcolm Gladwell! — who threaten to give Agents of Change a bad reputation.

FACT: In the short time it has taken you to read the last three paragraphs (excluding the first paragraph, which journalists call the “lede”), our planet has rotated approximately 80 kilometers. That’s roughly the distance you’d travel on a journey from San Diego, Calif. to Tijuana, Mexico and back — and then back into Tijuana a second time. To put things in greater perspective, a man making repeated trips back and forth across the international border into Tijuana for no apparent purpose would quickly arouse suspicion. And yet, most of us in our usual routines can routinely spend three minutes waiting to make a left turn out of the Starbucks parking lot, or repeating our order a third time to the barista at Starbucks, or exchanging saucy remarks with the new hire in Starbucks — and we’re oblivious to the world’s fast-paced movement.

With the exception of newscaster Lou Dobbs, whose eyeballs have likely exploded after reading about those hypothetical border crossings, most of us are content to let others worry about the spinning of the globe. We reason that if we can’t see it repeated endlessly on HDTV monitors, it can’t be happening.

Sweet Lulu: The man, the gasbag, and now the Syndrome

I refer to this as the “My God, Lou Dobbs Is an Idiot” Syndrome, after the famed CNN anchorman. What recommendations might I offer to Mr. Dobbs, and others who may share his propensity for obsessing over tiny outrages, real and imagined, while ignoring the larger implications of change?

I’d recommend a program I’ve created, called C-O-W, which is an acronym for the following action-items:

C: Cut out the cheesecake. Your cholesterol count has got to be through the roof, dad.
O: Outside with you; try going for a walk once and awhile instead of sitting on your duff and shrieking into a microphone.
W: Why don’t you try thinking, just one time, before running your mouth?

I’ve dedicated this program to Bart Simpson, that prototypal agent of change, who popularized the phrase “Don’t have a cow.” In this case, it’s alright. When you feel Dobbs Syndrome about to strike, go ahead and have this C-O-W.

See you in the future.

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(c) 2009, Nino Avanti, Agent of Change, LLP. All worldwide rights reserved. Excerpted from Nino’s forthcoming book, “Nino Avanti Presents 99 Things You’ll Need to Know in the Future (and a Couple of Other Things You’ll Finally Be Able to Forget)”